Trout fishing is picking up in Rangeley with early hatches emerging over the last few weeks. The early season mayflies consist of an assortment of Blue-winged Olives, March Browns, Quill Gordons, Hendricksons, Black Quills, and early caddis and little stoneflies, depending on where you are. Trout are still rising to midges as well.

We tangled with some really nice brook trout that had ascended rivers and streams following spawning smelt or suckers, migrating baitfish, or early hatching mayflies.

Of course, smallmouth bass and largemouth bass fishing is fast and furious as well. Stripers are everywhere. I am hearing reports of large numbers of bass in the coastal rivers and estuaries in Mcoast Maine – a less fished but awesome fishery in the late spring.

Of course, as an avid gardener, I am torn between wanting to fish as much as possible but also spend time in my gardens….

First things first. The Maine Sportsman Show is the first weekend of April – March 31, April 1, April 2. I will be presenting on Friday at 3 pm in Piscataquis 2nd Floor, and Saturday at noon in Washington 2nd Floor. My presentation is: Fly Fishing Tactics and Flies that Catch More Trout All Year. I will be signing and selling books after each presentation. I will be at the Maine Sportsman Booth Friday evening so stop by and say hello.

Opening day is also this upcoming weekend and colder March weather this year means fishing options will be more limited than the last few years. Ice is breaking up in southern Maine and the only snow left is in shady areas so water temperatures should start to warm up soon. I have seen plenty of early brown or black stoneflies flitting about.

Upcountry though it is still dead of winter. I was up the Kennebago way last weekend and great fun cross-country skiing and snowshoeing and everything was locked up tight with three feet of snow on the ground. I don’t see things thawing up there for quite a while, but you never know if we get a warm spell.

I will be heading south next week for some more fly-fishing in the southern Appalachians. I will keep you posted. I hope to see some of you at the show in Augusta this weekend.

Mid-winter for all of the Northeast felt like autumn. Temperatures for November, December, and early January ran between five and ten degrees above normal depending upon where you live. There has was no snow to speak of. At my house in Windham, we have had green grass for most of winter so far as I write this in mid January.

I have no ice fishing report for you because except for the northern half of Maine and New Hampshire, lakes and many ponds do not hold enough ice to support the weight of anybody. Ice will form and then a warm spell and a little wind melts it. Final ice-in and ice-our may only be six weeks apart.

Rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds that remain open all year have been fly- fishable with little snow, ice, and below freezing temps to contend with. Nice browns and rainbows have been landed in the East Outlet, the Presumpscot River, the Saco, the Royal River (in Yarmouth, Maine), and the rivers of southeast NH such as the Lamprey. And those are just the ones I know about. Many of us put away our fly-fishing gear, took out our ice-fishing traps and paraphernalia, shoved that to the side, and took out our fly-fishing gear and boats again!

My vegetable garden kept producing and I harvested veggies until almost Christmas, only covering the plants on a few cold days. I remember when for all practical purposes, the gardening was done by early October with the ground freezing solid by early November.

I enjoyed catching up with long time fly-fishing friends at the Fly Fishing Show in Marlborough in mid-January. Because of Covid, I haven’t seen them much recently. I got to say howdy to Abbie Schuster from Kismet Outfitters, Brett and Sue Damm from the Rangeley Fly Shop, author Bob Mallard, guide Scott Whitaker, from Bucktail Guide Service, Brian from Pheasant Tail Guide Service, and Brian Comfort from Deerfield Fly Shop. I have to say, I enjoyed the social interaction.

Of course, I also enjoyed chatting with readers of my books, some of those made the trip to Marlborough hoping to meet me and say hi.

Will it be an early spring? Time will tell. ‘Til next time.

First, a note about my book availability: Due to issues with my publisher, Flyfishers Guide to New England is out of stock on Amazon, LLBean, Cabelas, and other major retailers. It is still available with a few smaller-sized sellers and you can always purchase directly from me signed through Paypal on this website. My other books including “In Pursuit of Trophy Brook Trout is available on Amazon and the Rangeley Sports Shop, among other specialty stores.

Lindsey and I finished our southern swing in Cape San Blas on the gulf coast of Florida where I got a chance to fly fish several days. The redfish were not cooperative on the fly rod but I caught many species including lizardfish, pinfish, rockbass, flounder, and catfish, just to give a partial list. For game fish, I managed to land ladyfish and sea trout.
I don’t know why ladyfish don’t have a better reputation, they fight hard and leap way out of the water.

A gulf-coast angler could do well without ever changing flies away from a brown and white or brown and tan Deceiver or Clouser with heavy dumbbell eyes. Eighty percent of the time they do the trick.

Arriving back to Maine, the weather wasn’t much different than in the southeast – the first two weeks of November featured many days in the upper sixties to mid-seventies with lows as high as mid-fifties, about 15 to 20 degrees above normal. It was September weather and was frightening if you are concerned about global climate change,

Water temperatures were still in the 50s in the lower half of Maine so despite my trip fatigue I got right back out there. I had a great day on the Pleasant River and raised a number of beautiful brown trout about five minutes from my house. Why did I go all the way to North Carolina in October? Per usual this time of year, the browns were hammering Cosohammer streamers with yellow marabou.

I tried other local waters such as Otter and Chaffee Pond or the Presumpscot River but didn’t do as well as I expected to. The river was really too high to fish well. I missed a few trout in the ponds even though a few were rising and caught only small bass.

I had a lot of fun recently, giving a presentation to the University of New Hampshire fly-fishing club on adventure travel fishing in New Zealand, and Patagonia. UNH is close to several rivers that are stocked with nice fish all fall by a private stocking organization. They showed me photos of some chunky rainbows, so as I write this, rivers such as the Isinglass, Cocheco, Exeter, and Lamprey must be fishing decently. This time of year, it is mostly a nymphing exercise with eggs and caddis pupa patterns.

Let’s see if the fishing will hold up until December. I will be giving a presentation on fly-fishing for trout and salmon on ponds and lakes at the Sebago Trout Unlimited annual meeting On December 8th. Anyone can attend. See Sebago Trout Unlimited Facebook page for more information.

I don’t have as much to report on New England fishing during October because I was traveling. My wife and I took our small RV and drove down the Appalachian Mountains all the way to Florida, and then we kept going to the Gulf.

Lindsey and I mostly took in the sights, enjoyed camping along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and hiked part of the Appalachian Trail for old time’s sake (we through-hiked it in 1983.)

We did squeeze in some fishing of course. We took a day and fished the Davidson River for wild browns. A “river” in the North Carolina mountains seems more the size of a creek or small stream in Maine. Gorgeous water, particularly with the leaves turning, and we managed to fool a few small browns in the morning on small streamers and nymphs.

Later on, we were sight fishing some massive wild browns that hang out in a shallow and silty section below the hatchery – the added nutrients provide a bonanza of midges and other invertebrates, I guess. I managed to hook and land a beautiful fish on a zonker-type streamer I have written about several times, including in the Maine Sportsman.

We also floated Tennessee’s Watauga River, a tailwater known for its big browns and rainbows. The dam operators keep the water levels fluctuating all day, so we really didn’t have a good chance at any of the very spooky big browns, but we had a steady day with browns and rainbows of various sizes landed consistently. Lindsey landed both a three-pound rainbow and a cutbow. I caught the largest brown.

My understanding is that the weather in New England stayed freakishly warm and folks fishing for fall-stocked trout or fishing other waters that stay open caught some nice fish because the water stayed so warm. Some rivers such as the Presumpscot River were tough to fish because of the high flows.

I came home after three weeks, expecting my gardens to be frost killed and was surprised to see that we had not had a killing frost, so I just kept picking tomatoes, peppers, beans, radishes, squash, etc. as well as fresh cut flowers such as sunflowers, glads, and zinnias. Just crazy.

In the middle of September, the rains arrived, and did they. A swath in the western Maine mountains got over five inches of rain in a short period of time. Bridges in Jackman washed out and plenty of rain fell in southern Maine as well. It was too much of a good thing because rivers blew out and remained too high to fish well. I don’t know what others’ experiences were, but even with all of the rain, it either didn’t bring many fish up the rivers and streams, or they came up but didn’t hang around and kept moving way up to into the headwaters. Air and water temperatures were above normal so perhaps they were looking for cooler water.

I can’t speak about everywhere, but in western Maine, the Kennebago, Roach, East Outlet of Kennebec (just to name a few), you had to work for every fish you caught. Hopefully, you had better luck in other places.

I saw reports from the Miramachi that Atlantic Salmon did the same thing, and didn’t stage in the usual famous pools, but just kept moving upstream.

In October I did not see one redd in the Little Kennebago for first time in my memory, perhaps confirming that fished spawned further upstream this year.

Lake and pond fishing stayed good with hatches continuing becase of the warm weather and fish looking up during the calm days. We had plenty of windy days as well though.

I hope the traditional fishing season was good to you!

September/ fall fishing was a tale of two seasons. The first half of the month felt like August. This is now the norm for this time of year as the climatologists’ study of the data shows northern temperate forests colder weather is about three weeks later than it used to be.

A sampling of the temperatures I took in the 2^nd week of September was:

 Lower Kennebago River: 71 degrees, surface of Moosehead Lake: 68, air temperature at my camp on the 10^th:  80 degrees. Most of the fish didn’t move into rivers, streams or the lake shallows because of warm water.  For example, my daughter went up to the Debouille Pond area and the trout were not in the shallows yet.

River water levels were better than the last few years, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference.

Even by the end of the month, most places in central and lower parts of Maine hadn’tt experienced any sort of frost and many nights stayed in the upper 40s to mid-50s.

Great fishing could be found if you fished areas in lakes where fish were staging, waiting for river waters to cool. These are usually places with springs or ground water cooling the water. I did find one area in a shallow part of a pond where this was the case and caught dozens of trout in the 8-10-inch range without moving. In my defense, I was fishing barbless and kept waiting for bigger fish to arrive, (which never happened.)

Occasionally, someone caught a nice trout or salmon because a few fish always seem to move early, but that was the exception, not the rule. I caught a few nice trout in staging areas as did others, but always within half an hour of nightfall or sunrise. Then nothing.

More about later September in the next post.